I have, once more, not been having an amazing few weeks. I find myself with three weeks of rent left before I find myself in a financial position even more precarious than the one I was in previously. I've been attempting to navigate two different bureaucracies to get the support I need to keep living, which has been humiliating, slow and uncertain. Finding more contract work has been even harder: the current economic crisis, even in its early stages, has been anything but easy on the market for trans women who are good at infrastructure, DevOps and data engineering work. And of course, several governments (including, regrettably, my own) seem intent on making my existence in public illegal. Things have sucked.
My response to all of this has been curious, even to myself: I've spent a week and a half containerising the deployment of my website (and if you're reading this, you're reading it on a pair of Docker containers running on Flatcar: I plan to do a more in-depth technical write-up soon). On the face of it, this doesn't seem like a sensible choice: considering the sheer levels of bigotry in the tech world, this is unlikely to get me work in the medium or long term. Neither is it going to improve my chances of getting money now: after all, it doesn't fix many of my very real sales or marketing problems. And there's not really a technical need for it; while there are gains, they're somewhat marginal. And yet, I found the whole process remarkably compelling and soothing in a way that little else has been these days.
Nor am I alone in this: there's a striking prevalence of trans women who cope in similar ways. We set up self-hosted Gitea servers, we build our own websites and blogs from scratch with a wide variety of different tools, we do strange things with Raspberry Pis and some of us even leak no-fly lists. While this is economically beneficial to an extent, the attachment of trans women to tech seems to go beyond that: we have a moral attachment to the field even when it doesn't reward us externally.
Which raises the question: given these struggles and the precarious position I exist in, why did I think this was the best use of my time? And why do so many trans women in similar positions also think so? Why, in short, do we keep learning how to do stuff with tech at a high level even when it doesn't seem economically valuable or worth it?
Code is agency
First and foremost, working with technology and writing code gives us control over our own environments in a world where the society we're embedded in heavily limits that. Your average trans person, alas, does not have a huge level of control over their circumstances. Our notorious difficulties with employment in a world where doing much of anything requires money mean that our horizons become quite restricted compared to what a cis person might be able to do. Our networks of social support tend to be much thinner than the average cis person's, and we consequently have very little integration with or support from our local communities. Particularly outside of major cities, therefore, there's often very little we can directly do to shape our local environments to suit us better. Technology, however, is much more reshapable than the real world, and consequently gives us access to a wide open space that we can make our own. Learning to work with tech, therefore, gives us a space to exercise agency that we wouldn't otherwise have, which is a massive benefit for our mental health and well-being. It's no surprise, then, that mastering tech would prove very compelling to us.
On the simplest level, a lot of us use Linux as our primary or only operating system. That in itself gives a level of control over our computer and the way we interact with computing and the internet that Windows or Mac users can only dream of. We can, for the most part, just do what we want with our systems. They won't install mandatory AI tools without our consent. They won't stalk us online. Instead of having to click through a whole bunch of menus to get anything done, we can write a command in a terminal shell to do exactly what we want. Given the extent to which we live our lives through our computers these days, being able to use a computer that isn't constantly trying to screw or data out of you is deeply empowering.
Looking further out to the web, being able to host your own website on it with no limitations beyond what HTML, CSS and Caddy or Nginx can do buys us freedom that we badly need. In an environment intent on silencing us, it gives us a voice and lets us speak to the world without some godawful social media platform in the way. It lets us build and host tools for our community that let us talk to each other and make our lives easier. It lets us make an environment for ourselves that we like, in short.
Having an internet presence in this way, most importantly, lets us ask for help and support each other. My local environment isn't very supportive at the best of times: while people are generally polite and civil, this doesn't extend to being given support or opportunities when I need them, and in many ways, when I need support locally I'm largely on my own. If I were my same trans self living where I live but without the internet, I'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble. Fortunately, however, this isn't the case. I can write a blog post and be relatively confident, these days, that a thousand or so people will read it. I can use my voice to help others interpret the world. I can help people feel less alone, I can demonstrate my mastery of several fields of work, and when I'm struggling, I can tell people and be relatively confident that it will be seen. Even when I'm poor and struggling, this outlet can bring in financial support for my writing or help me find people who need my services. And that's no small thing: it gives me and those trans people who do similar things a lot more ability to shape their lives.
Code is truth
Existing as a trans woman in this world is an exercise in being gaslit. Whether it's the media spreading transphobic rhetoric consistently under the guise of "debate", your parents and those around you desperately trying to persuade you that you aren't trans, hiring managers consistently and blatantly lying to you about why you weren't hired or the current US regime trying to criminalise your existence for completely false reasons, being told that our perception of reality is fundamentally flawed and that we need to believe the perception of the people oppressing us over our own. The pressure is constant and exhausting, and it's hard not to start internalising parts of it.
Given this, tech and software engineering is an excellent place to reassert that one's perception of truth and knowledge is accurate. While so many of the structures we've built around software are manifestly unjust, software itself doesn't really care who you are. You are beholden to nobody but the compiler and the hardware you're deploying to, and that can be remarkably reassuring. When you've built something that works or solved a difficult problem, you know you've done it. You know that it works, and you know that what you've done is true. Nobody can take that away from you. Having points of truth like that is really important when you're trying to survive in a world that would deprive you of them.
If you develop true mastery of a field, this grows even further. It's not unusual for women to be seen as less qualified then men in the fields they work in: this usually goes even further for trans women. This, alas, is something of a universal. The thing about tech, however, is that it's possible to break out of this to an extent. It really is possible to master the field enough that you can be confident that you're actually really good at it, and thus that a lot of the ways in which people lie to you are actually lies.
While this is cold comfort to a degree, it does help. Historically, having an accurate perception of what your problems are can at least help you find some level of peace: Seneca, I think, would have been much more distressed had he a less accurate assessment of who Nero was, and being able to identify confidently that a situation is unfair and that you are being treated badly lets you respond appropriately to the problem. If we can't have justice, understanding that this is injustice and fighting against it is still a comfort.
Software, therefore, allows us to push back against those who would attempt to force their own truth onto us. It's an effective and compelling tool for staying sane and holding to truth in the face of a world largely consisting of shameless, practiced liars.
Code is power
While I don't have much time for the Andreessen-type tech boosters, it remains true (unfortunately) that software has eaten the world. Those that control software, therefore, can exert a lot of influence on how the world is. Usually, alas, this is used for ill, as so much of the tech world is controlled by those already born to wealth and privilege. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and half a hundred other rich white men have used technology to seize power, degrade us and strip us of our dignity. Tech, however, is difficult to control, and when all is said and done, any person with a decent knowledge of software can develop this power and fight back.
Though people can try and sometimes succeed, it's remarkably difficult to actually cut off someone's access to software. Cheap computers and free software are relatively available, free internet or unsecured wi-fi networks are all over the place and the core competencies of tech and software engineering are firmly ensconced in someone's head. Seriously limiting internet access, therefore requires state power, and unlike so many other ways to silence opponents of capital, private companies are likely to have real difficulty doing it.
This means, by-the-by, that for a trans woman, not only does a strong knowledge of tech give us agency over our own situation, it also gives us the tools that we need to push back a little. Whether it's maia arson crimew leaking the no-fly list, the plethora of furry hackers making life hell for bigoted organisations the world over, or even just the many, many engineers who get so good that companies, for better or worse, can't ignore them, we can make life better and fairer for ourselves and others in a way that few other skills can. You can't stop us from learning, you can't stop us from getting good, you can't stop us from writing code and you can't stop us from making it available to everyone. Software engineering is, in essence, access to an extremely powerful means of production that can't be gatekept or monopolised by the ruling class in the way that almost every other one can.
Even such simple things as understanding how government websites work can be a massive way to fight power where we see it. Websites that provide necessary services are often outdated, badly designed or deliberately difficult to navigate: understanding how they're built lets us make people actually claim the services they're owed. It lets us find information that government websites have badly obfuscated, and it lets us archive and retain data that a government might rather erase. When one is suffering, one needs to know that one's fighting back in some way, and this is an excellent way for us to do it.
Code is mastery
Software engineering and the wider tech world, in short, gives us trans women a powerful tool to control our world. Sure, we might be relentlessly oppressed in material reality. Our knowledge and our truth might be ruthlessly oppressed. We might be the subject of constant, incessant lies. Tech, however debased it might have been, gives us an avenue of escape. It lets us, for a while, inhabit a world that we can shape more to our liking. We can make a world for ourselves where our self-expression isn't suppressed, where we can express our truth freely and where we can gain mastery of a difficult and powerful thing without being gatekept from it.
Furthermore, we can bring this knowledge with us back into materiality. We can use what we've learned to improve our economic situation, to protect each other in the real world and to reveal things about those in power that they'd rather not know. We can assert truth against lies, kindness and humanity against cruelty and we can help each other and other people in the process. Given that it does all this for us, why would we not want to master technology?